A project led by professor Regina Barzilay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the first to show how ancient, lost or unknown languages can be decoded using a computer program, according to National Geographic.

The MIT team was able to decode the “lost language” of Ugaritic, an ancient Semitic language used in Old Testament times, using no more computing power than that of a laptop. The program took no longer than a few hours to link most Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents.